Red Rain

by Toby Neal

  “I’m so sorry you went through all that, Michael. I don’t know what to tell you, except that none of it happened but the first attack. I think the best way to convince you is to show you.”

  I rubbed my hands over my face. The skin felt rubbery and numb. “Am I crazy?” I whispered. “Is this why I’m here?”

  “No. You’re not crazy. You just—had a vivid dreaming experience during your coma.”

  If it had been anyone other than Dr. Wilson telling me this, I wouldn’t have believed her. “Does Lei know I’m back?”

  “Yes. She’s here in Honolulu, waiting to get clearance to see you. We need to go through a few more hoops to make sure you’re okay.” Dr. Wilson steadied me as I swung my legs to the side of the bed. I stood, apparently for the first time in a couple of weeks.

  My legs almost crumpled. A wave of dizziness had me clutching the much smaller woman beside me. The door opened, and Falconer came in. He took three giant steps and caught me before I brought both of us to the ground.

  “Falconer! You’re really alive!” The big black man heaved me up onto the bed, his mouth set in a familiar reserve that hid his true nature—generous and brave as hell.

  “I hear you’re talkin’ crazy, Stevens. You lucky dog. Spent the whole time we were captive sleeping in a comfy bed while we were trapped in a box.”

  “Not a pit?”

  “No pit. Just hot, buggy, and bored as hell in a deserted old barracks building.”

  “Great to see you awake, LT. You had us worried.” Young Tim Kerry entered, grinning. He was thinner than I remembered when I first met him at Camp Trifecta, but whole and alive. My eyes filled at the sight of him. I rubbed them with a thumb and forefinger, pretending they were itchy.

  A third man came forward to my bed, hand extended. His cheeks were plump and rosy, his blue eyes friendly. “Don’t believe we met formally, but I saw you around the camp before we were captured. Devan MacDonald, camp manager. Glad to see you up.”

  “Great to meet you,” I murmured. My last sight of MacDonald had been the croc biting into his bloated body. I rubbed my eyes again.

  Falconer fussed around the bed. “Why do they have you stuck back here in the loony-tune section?”

  “I still can’t believe you’re alive.” I couldn’t help reaching out to squeeze Falconer’s shoulder. Emotionally, he felt like a brother to me. So did Kerry. I looked around at the three of them. “I had this vivid dream while I was in the coma. We escaped the kidnappers. All kinds of shit happened. Falconer kept us alive—but never mind.” I shook my head and immediately regretted that motion. “Dr. Wilson, I believe you now. This explains why my feet are fine.”

  Falconer swung my legs back onto the bed and pulled the sheet up over them. “We’ll have a beer when you’re out of here, and you can tell me all about it.” He cracked a smile, a flash of lightning in his ebony face, and lifted a hand as he left. I watched the three of them go. I finally let the tears overflow.

  It was still hard to believe that the men I thought I’d known were entirely the product of a head injury. Dr. Wilson patted my shoulder, drawing my attention back to her.

  “I have some cognitive exercises to take you through.”

  We did those for a while: memory exercises, puzzle exercises, word associations. I began to tire, my memory slipping, and I badly needed to go to the bathroom. “Can we take a break?”

  “Of course.” She hopped off the bed with an athletic grace that reminded me of Lei with a sharp pang. “I’ll go tell the Security Solutions and the army people you’re more oriented now. I’m also authorizing you to be moved to a regular room.”

  “Thanks. It sucks to get back and be treated like a head case. I just needed to know what was going on.”

  “Speaking of head case.” Caprice Wilson leveled a finger and those steely blue eyes at me. “We’re going to discuss the reasons you took this job in the first place. We’re not done talking.” She left. I managed to get my wobbly ass to the toilet in the corner, relieving myself with my bandaged head leaning on the wall.

  The whole damn escape had been imaginary. How screwed up was that? I thought back over the many unforgettable moments as we’d made our way through the jungle—beginning with Anchara appearing as a glowing moth, assuming human form, then showing me the way out.

  I should have realized then that none of it was real.

  But it had seemed so real, right down to mosquito bites I still felt an urge to scratch. Could I have been mistaken about Aquinas and the uniformed man, too? When did I really wake up?

  Were there parts of my adventure that really had happened?

  I groped my way back to the bed and fell into an exhausted doze, resting up before the next round of questioning.

  Chapter Thirty

  Lieutenant Colonel Westbrook, dapper in his brass-encrusted uniform, greeted Lei formally in the hospital lobby, but Dr. Wilson embraced Lei with the light, firm hug Lei had become used to in the years they’d known each other. She smelled of jasmine perfume and a tiny tang of anxious perspiration that Lei’s sensitive nose picked up in spite of the psychologist’s bright smile.

  “Well, I have good news and bad news.” Dr. Wilson drew Lei over to a corner seating unit in the hospital’s bustling lobby. “Michael’s in the psychiatric unit.”

  “Why is he there?” Lei tried to keep her voice even, worry making it sharp.

  Dr. Wilson looked around, as if checking for someone overhearing them, but there was no one else in the well-worn area with its teetering stack of Insights for Children and battered National Geographic magazines. Westbrook tugged at his jacket. “I heard he’s confused and disoriented.”

  Dr. Wilson frowned at the army officer. “He is, but there’s something more going on. I was listed as one of Michael’s health care team on his Security Solutions application, and I also provide return debriefing for their staffers, but no one called me about Michael’s arrival. I heard about it accidentally from some other staff people, and when I came to investigate, found he’d been locked up in an isolation unit with a diagnosis of severe brain injury, massive systemic infection, and psychosis.”

  Lei clutched the arm of the cheap settee she was sitting on. “What?” Her head swam. Her vision telescoped. “Is he going to live?”

  Dr. Wilson patted Lei’s leg sharply, and the touch brought Lei back into her body.

  “Here’s where the good news and bad news come in. He did have a severe head trauma. He was in a coma the whole time he was kidnapped, according to the men who returned. They saw him go down after a blow to the head, and he was shot then, too. He was kept in a bed under medical care while they were imprisoned in a nearby structure. The staff here at Tripler apparently initially thought he was psychotic because he has a very different version of events.”

  Lei focused on breathing and keeping the urge to vomit in check as Dr. Wilson repeated the broad brushstrokes of Michael’s version of the ordeal. “I had to conclude that he had a very vivid lucid dream during his coma. But the upshot is, he’s going to have a long road to recovery. He’s had some cognitive damage to his short-term memory and processing speed. I’m hopeful that’s only temporary. The infection is dealt with, and he’s recovering from that. I’ve changed his diagnosis to traumatic brain injury only, and I’m having him moved from the isolation unit—but I can’t help feeling someone wants to cover something up, to silence and discredit Michael somehow.”

  “You think there was an insider in Security Solutions or the army who was involved with the kidnapping?” Lei asked.

  “There might be. Michael has some information he tried to communicate privately, though he was pretty overwhelmed to find out he didn’t really survive killing wild pigs and fighting crocodiles in the jungle.”

  “Oh my God. I don’t know which is worse—that he went through all that in his head, or if he really had.”

  “I don’t know either, to be honest. He wasn’t in the best shape mental-health-wise going into all t
his.” They gazed at each other for a long moment. Lying between them was a long friendship and history of knowing the passionate, loyal, dedicated—and damaged—man Lei had married. “We just have to move forward and hope for the best.”

  “When can I see him?”

  “Not until he’s been debriefed with the brass from Security Solutions and the army. I’ll text you when his assessments and interviews are done,” Dr. Wilson said.

  “We have that scheduled for first thing tomorrow morning, if he’s in shape for it,” Westbrook said. The army officer fiddled with his cuffs, clearly uncomfortable. “I’m sure this will all work out just fine, Sergeant. Try to relax. We’ll get your husband back to you in short order.” And to Lei’s surprise, he sketched her a brief salute before turning crisply and exiting the room.

  “I think he feels bad about what happened.” Dr. Wilson gazed after the officer’s upright form as the hospital doors whisked shut behind him.

  “Thank God you’re on the situation,” Lei said, impulsively leaning over to hug the petite psychologist. “Don’t let anyone give you any shit. Including Michael. And please, hurry. I can’t wait to see him.”

  “Will do.” Dr. Wilson pulled back from Lei’s arms. “I’d better get back to him. I want to oversee his move to a different room.”

  “See you soon,” Lei said to Dr. Wilson’s retreating back.

  I drifted in that gray, dreamlike state between sleep and waking, ticking over the threads of truth and fiction, sorting and sifting. Once, when I was a child, I’d visited my mom’s parents in the Midwest. There was some angst between them that was never spoken of, and we never went again—but now I was back in my grandfather’s barn, my nose filled with the sweet, musty, dense smell of hay.

  Mounds of it, loose, lay waiting to be forked into a wheelbarrow. A ladder led to a huge loft, piled high with more golden green bricks of tightly packed hay. Shafts of sunlight shone through knotholes in the old wooden structure, bright and substantial as gold bars. My grandfather stood before me, tall and rawboned, in a pair of overalls. I recognized his piercing, light blue eyes—I saw them every day in the mirror. He always had a toothpick in the corner of his seamed mouth. Today he took the toothpick out and tossed it into the pile of hay.

  “Ten dollars to whichever of you boys finds it first,” he said. “Nothing like your first lesson in finding a needle in a haystack.”

  I remembered diving enthusiastically into the hay pile with Jared, galvanized by the quest to get that “needle.” After what seemed like hours of burrowing, winnowing, and sorting, we’d had to give up on earning the princely sum of ten dollars.

  I felt like that now. The truth was somewhere in my head, elusive, blending with so much else. Deep in the snarl of confusion that was my mind, there was something important I needed to know, and share.

  I did have a few things I was going to carry forward from this head-trip adventure—I had to go back to solving active cases. While I’d been good as a trainer, I needed the physical and mental challenge of being on the streets as a detective. Maybe my role could be modified to working cases as a mentor to new detectives.

  Yeah, I’d like that, and it would be active enough to keep me feeling alive.

  And I still believed I’d met Anchara in that shed and she’d decided to stop haunting me. I hadn’t had a single tormented vision of her death since she’d appeared to me, and I usually had some flashback involving her every day.

  I pictured that first drink—the ice cubes in the brown liquid. The smell, opening my nostrils. The taste. The feeling of warmth as the liquor made a path to my stomach. I could think about it, and while it still appealed, it didn’t fill me with longing for oblivion like before. I wasn’t going to drink anymore, and I felt confident I’d be able to follow through with that resolve. Alcohol’s hold on me was broken, too.

  The sound of the door unlocking brought me fully awake, and I tossed the sheet off my legs and sat up straighter, surprised to see Dr. Aquinas. He was in civilian clothing: a blue polo shirt and chinos. He wasn’t wearing the surgical mask I’d always seen him in before.

  “Hey. I remember you,” I said. “Dr. Aquinas.”

  He smiled pleasantly, turning to the man following him. “Told you he was more conscious than he even knew he was.”

  Major Forsythe, from Camp Trifecta, followed him in. The major turned and shut the door deliberately.

  I frowned. “What’s this about? Is this my debrief interview?”

  “Yes, it is,” Dr. Aquinas said. “Just relax.”

  I was expecting the debrief, but I was damned sick of hearing I needed to relax. I tightened my abs, coiling my energy, every sense alert. My gut told me these two weren’t here for any good reason.

  Major Forsythe came and stood close, looking down at me. He was spit-polished to a regulation shine, and his eyes on me were river-stone cold. “This is part of your exit debrief. What do you remember?” he barked.

  As soon as I heard Forsythe’s voice, I knew this was the man who’d posed the newspaper against me and taken a proof-of-life picture. This was the officer whose back I’d seen exiting the room.

  This was the needle I’d been looking for. I tried to keep that recognition out of my face and voice.

  “I don’t remember much, sir. I just learned from Dr. Wilson that I went on a whole mind trip during the coma. I thought I escaped. Blew up some choppers, fought snakes and crocs.” I had no difficulty chuckling weakly and flapping a trembling hand. “I think I’m pretty fucked up.”

  Both of them stared at me speculatively. They were making up their minds on whether I was too far gone to be credible, or if I was a loose end that needed clipping off. Forsythe glanced at Aquinas and lifted his chin slightly. That was all the warning I had, but it was enough.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I threw myself off the bed on the opposite side from the doctor, landing in a crouch as Aquinas plunged a syringe into the pillow where I’d just been. The hospital gown bagged and flew open, exposing my backside as I landed—but that was the least of my worries.

  Forsythe cursed. “It has to look like natural causes.”

  Adrenaline pumped through me. I’d killed guards, blown up helicopters, fought crocs, snakes, and the elements. I wasn’t going to be slaughtered like a veal calf in its fattening stall.

  I threw my weight against the metal rail of the wheeled bed, hoping like hell it wasn’t locked in place—and it wasn’t. The unexpected vigor and direction of my attack knocked Forsythe and Aquinas off-balance, and I rammed them both backward, pushing with all I had until I’d pinned them against the wall with the bed. I threw the brake on to lock it in place and ran to the door, pounding on it and deepening my voice authoritatively.

  “Need help with this patient!”

  Aquinas crawled up and out from behind the bed and leaped on me from behind, the needle in his fist. We did a nightmare chicken dance as he climbed my back, arms around my shoulders and legs around my waist, trying to stab me with whatever was in that deadly syringe.

  The door flew open and two orderlies stood there, faces blank with surprise as I slammed Aquinas back into the wall, trying to dislodge him. Forsythe extricated himself from behind the bed, yelling.

  “Take that man down! He’s a danger to himself and others!”

  Magic words in a mental health ward.

  I just hoped that the needle that would finally get me wasn’t the one in Aquinas’s hand. I managed to get a grip around the man’s wrist as the orderlies tackled us and bore me to the ground.

  “He’s trying to kill me!” I screamed. “Check what’s in this syringe!” I managed to keep the syringe away from my neck, but it was bound to go in any second as I was overpowered.

  “He’s aggressive and psychotic! It’s just a sedative,” Aquinas yelled. I shut my eyes, breathless with pain, as the heavy orderlies wrestled with me and one of them sat on my wounded chest, but I didn’t let my death grip on Aquinas’s wrist go.

&n
bsp; “Stop this immediately! This patient is in my care!” Dr. Wilson’s voice, high and clear, pierced the chaos. “He trusts me, Dr. Aquinas! Let me help.”

  Dr. Wilson appeared above me, limned from behind with the overhead light like an angel. She caught and held back Aquinas’s hand. The syringe trembled, just above my skin. “Calm down, Michael. I’m here now, and you’re in my professional care.”

  I went instantly limp, dropping my arms to the ground, knowing that I had to play this right or I was still dead, right in front of her.

  “Yes, Dr. Wilson. Thank you,” I said meekly.

  The orderlies sat on me an endless moment longer to make sure I was subdued.

  “Get a restraint vest,” Dr. Wilson barked. “I don’t want him to have any more medications right now. He’s having enough trouble with reality.” I didn’t like her words. Her expression was blandly disapproving, as if I were a naughty preschooler, and I knew she was playing to the observers. A third orderly appeared, carrying a straitjacket. The only thing between me and death right now was a petite blond woman with steely eyes. “You have to put this on, Michael. You’re not safe to yourself or others right now.” I heard the warning in her words. She was trying to protect me.

  I allowed the men to slide the straitjacket onto my arms and bind them across my chest.

  Once I was restrained, Dr. Wilson turned to Aquinas and Forsythe. “Please go. You’ve upset my patient. Clearly, seeing you reminded him of his ordeal.”

  Forsythe straightened his uniform. His face was congested with rage. “This man is psychotic. Dangerous. I’m going to recommend that he be locked up permanently.”

  The major strode out, chest puffed like a courting pigeon. I remembered the first day I’d met the man. I’d committed the cardinal sin of being taller than him, and he’d never forgiven me for it.

  Aquinas recapped the syringe and went to slide it into his pocket, but Dr. Wilson gave a charming, collegial smile. She extended her hand, palm up. “Hey. I might need that. He could still get aggressive, and I’d like to be prepared.”